Classical music: String quartets shine this spring
Credit to Author: Tracey Tufnail| Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2020 19:00:58 +0000
Doric String Quartet with Marc-André Hamelin
When: 3 p.m., Feb. 16
Where: Vancouver Playhouse
Tickets and info:vanrecital.com
Schumann Quartet
When: 3 p.m., March 1
Where: Vancouver Playhouse
Tickets and info:vanrecital.com
Pavel Haas Quartet with Boris Giltburg, piano
When: 3 p.m., March 8
Where: Vancouver Playhouse
Tickets and info:friendsofchambermusic.ca
Despite the off-again, on-again winter, February and March are prime time for two of our major chamber music presenters, who hope to lure us into the concert hall with some exceptional programs featuring the Doric, Schumann, and Pavel Hass string quartets.
String quartets have the most exceptional repertoire depth of any chamber music configuration, and they are the core of what Friends of Chamber Music brings to town. The FOC has planned an ambitious end to its 72nd season: the Takács Quartet playing all six Bartók quartets over two evenings, April 26 and 28.
The Pavel Hass Quartet will be heard March 8 in a program featuring quartets by Čekovská and Tchaikovsky, plus a quintet including pianist Boris Giltberg. Giltberg made his Vancouver debut in 2011, and you can be sure that his passionate playing will be welcome in Dvořák’s 1887 Piano Quintet.
And there’s some new music as well with a performance — surely a Vancouver first — of A Midsummer Quartet (2016) by Ľubica Čekovská. Born in 1975, the Slovakian composer studied at London’s Royal Academy of Music and created quite a stir with her operatic treatment of The Picture of Dorian Gray. She also did the music for the 2016 computer game The Mandate.
The Vancouver Recital Society hosts string quartets less frequently, but when founder Leila Getz finds a group she admires, you can be sure that Vancouver audiences will hear them.
The Doric Quartet returns to town on Feb. 16 to play quartets by Dvorak and Sibelius, plus a new composition — the Canadian premiere of Mark-André Hamelin’s Piano Quintet, with the composer at the keyboard. Hamelin is well known to Vancouver as a piano virtuoso as VRS audiences know him as a composer from his demonically difficult Toccata on L’homme armé and a short curtain-raiser commissioned for the its 40th anniversary.
VRS brokers the Vancouver debut of the Schumann Quartet on March 1 as brothers Mark, Eric and Ken Schumann include violist Liisa Randalu in their family enterprise. The young quartet captured the 2016 Newcomer Award at the BBC Music Magazine Awards and hopes to captivate the VRS audience with Mozart’s K. 499 “Hoffmeister” Quartet, Mendelssohn’s Quartet in E minor, Op. 44, No. 2, and Shostakovich’s intense Ninth Quartet (1964).
The programming of these three ensembles defines how chamber music ensembles are adapting for today’s audiences. The Doric and Pavel Hass groups both seek to expand their range through the addition of guest artists and the inclusion of very recent work, belying the notion that chamber music audiences are stuck in the past. The Schumann ensemble is still establishing its reputation and wants to be heard in classics but, as younger performers, they consider the mid-century work of Shostakovich as “classic” as Mozart or Mendelssohn.
Finally, there’s a special quartet project at the end of March. Though local fans associate chamber music with the Vancouver Playhouse, presenters are always on the lookout for new spaces that are attractive, accessible, and acoustically good. On a golden day last fall a little delegation made a visit to the beautifully renovated Congregation Beth Israel synagogue on Oak Street. It didn’t take long to confirm that this could be a wonderful new space for music as well as worship.
Then it turned out that the Jerusalem Quartet, who have a long-standing invitation to town from the VRS — and who will be essaying all of the Beethoven string quartets in the fall — were coincidentally on the West Coast. Why not an impromptu concert?
Why not, indeed? They will perform on March 26 at the synagogue.